TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

Transcription

1 TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS Report of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation AND Partnerships FOR Improved Student Learning Commissioned by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education November 2010

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3 Table of Contents H Panel Members... i Executive Summary... ii Unprecedented Responsibilities, Unmet Challenges... 1 Turning the Education of Teachers Upside-Down... 2 Ten Design Principles for Clinically Based Preparation... 5 A New, Clinically Based Model for Teacher Preparation... 8 Mapping the Shift: Building a New Model Promising Practices Rx for Transformation: Panel Recommendations More Rigorous Accountability Strengthening Candidate Selection and Placement Revamping Curriculum, Incentives, and Staffing Supporting Partnerships Expanding the Knowledge Base Call to Action Eight States Initiate Alliance for Clinical Teacher Preparation Role of Accreditation Creation of Task Forces Conclusion...27 Endnotes...30

4 NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning Panel Members Co Chairs Nancy L. Zimpher Chancellor State University of New York Dwight D. Jones Commissioner of Education State of Colorado Sona Karentz Andrews Vice Chancellor Oregon University System (formerly Provost Boise State University) Martin Blank President Institute for Educational Leadership Tom Carroll President National Commission on Teaching and America s Future Marilyn Cochran-Smith Professor of Teacher Education Lynch School of Education Boston College Larry G. Daniel Dean College of Education and Human Services University of North Florida Catherine Emihovich Dean College of Education University of Florida Sharon Feiman-Nemser Professor and Director of Mandel Center Brandeis University Beverly Hall Superintendent Atlanta Public Schools James Kohlmoos President Knowledge Alliance Arthur Levine President Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Monica Martinez President New Tech High Schools Tina Marshall-Bradley Assistant to Provost Paine College Peter McWalters Program Director Council of Chief State School Officers Renee Moore National Board Certified Teacher Mississippi Delta Community College, Teacher Leaders Network, Center for Teaching Quality Tom Payzant Professor of Practice Harvard Graduate School of Education Andrew Pruski School Board Member Anne Arundel County, MD Charles Reed Chancellor California State University System Sharon Porter Robinson President and CEO American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education Andrew Rotherham Co-Founder and Partner Bellwether Education Partners Lorrie A. Shepard Dean School of Education University of Colorado at Boulder Jesse Solomon Executive Director Boston Teacher Residency Program Christopher J. Steinhauser Superintendent Long Beach Unified School District Long Beach, CA Dennis van Roekel President (represented by Rebecca Pringle, Secretary-Treasurer) National Education Association Patricia Wasley Professor and former Dean College of Education University of Washington Randi Weingarten President (represented by John Mitchell, Dir. Educational Issues) American Federation of Teachers Kathy Wiebke National Board Certified Teacher Executive Director K-12 Center University of Northern Arizona Donna Wiseman Dean College of Education University of Maryland College Park Ex Officio James G. Cibulka President NCATE Donna Gollnick Senior Vice President NCATE Project Director Marsha Levine Senior Consultant NCATE Resource People Barnett Berry President and CEO Center for Teaching Quality Kenneth Howey Senior Fellow The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government Research Professor SUNY Emerson Elliott Director of Special Projects NCATE Linda G. Roberts former Director Office of Educational Technology U.S. Dept. of Education Jon Schnur CEO and Co-founder New Leaders for New Schools James H. Shelton III Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement U.S. Dept. of Education NCATE Staff Emerson Elliott Director of Special Projects Donald Feuerstein Senior Advisor Shari Francis Vice President for State Relations Jane Leibbrand Vice President for Communications Amy March Staff Associate for State Relations Eric Watts Graduate Intern Editorial Support Sheppard Ranbom Scott Cech CommunicationWorks, LLC i TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

5 Executive Summary The education of teachers in the United States needs to be turned upside down. To prepare effective teachers for 21st century classrooms, teacher education must shift away from a norm which emphasizes academic preparation and course work loosely linked to school-based experiences. Rather, it must move to programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses. H This demanding, clinically based approach will create varied and extensive opportunities for candidates to connect what they learn with the challenge of using it, while under the expert tutelage of skilled clinical educators. Candidates will blend practitioner knowledge with academic knowledge as they learn by doing. They will refine their practice in the light of new knowledge acquired and data gathered about whether their students are learning. Today there are many examples of excellent clinically based programs, and many are cited in this report. These programs can be found in higher education and in new pathways to prepare teachers. However, the nation needs an entire system of excellent programs, not a cottage industry of pathbreaking initiatives. The nation needs an entire system of excellent programs, not a cottage industry of pathbreaking initiatives. In order to make this change, teacher education programs must work in close partnership with school districts to redesign teacher preparation to better serve prospective teachers and the students they teach. Partnerships should include shared decision making and oversight on candidate selection and completion by school districts and teacher education programs. This will bring accountability closer to the classroom, based largely on evidence of candidates effective performance and their impact on student learning. It also will ensure professional accountability, creating a platform to ensure that teachers are able to own, and fully utilize, the knowledge base of most effective practice. In this way, we believe, public and professional accountability for candidate effectiveness can be aligned for the first time. Creating a system built around programs centered on clinical practice also holds great promise for advancing shared responsibility for teacher preparation; supporting the development of complex teaching skills; and ensuring that all teachers will know how to work closely with colleagues, students, and community. It will be a crucial step towards empowering teachers to meet the urgent needs of schools and the challenges of 21st century classrooms. The vision for transforming the education of the nation s nearly four million teacher workforce presented in these pages comes not from any one group but from a diverse group representing a broad range of perspectives. The NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning is comprised of state officials, P-12 and higher education leaders, teachers, teacher educators, union representatives, and critics of teacher education. We spent the past ten months addressing the gap between how teachers are prepared and what schools need. As part of this effort, we have identified 10 design principles for clinically based programs and a comprehensive series of strategies to revolutionize teacher education. ii

6 What Needs To Be Done We recognize that revamping teacher education around clinical practice is not only a matter of adding more hours for student teaching, ensuring improved mentoring of candidates, or adding new courses here and there, even though many preparation programs have made these significant improvements. This report recommends sweeping changes in how we deliver, monitor, evaluate, oversee, and staff clinically based preparation to nurture a whole new form of teacher education. Specifically, the report calls for: n More Rigorous Accountability. All teacher education programs should be accountable for and their accreditation contingent upon how well they address the needs of schools and help improve P-12 student learning. This will require more rigorous monitoring and enforcement for program approval and accreditation according to a clear and definite timeline and holding all programs to the same high standards. School districts will have a more significant role in designing and implementing teacher education programs, selecting candidates for placement in their schools, and assessing candidate performance and progress. n Strengthening Candidate Selection and Placement. In order to make teacher education programs more selective and diverse, the selection process must take into consideration not only test scores but key attributes that lead to effective teachers. We urge states and the federal government to develop opportunities for teacher candidates to work in hard-to-staff schools through a matching program similar to that developed by the American Association for Medical Colleges for placing medical school graduates in teaching hospitals for internships and residencies. The report calls for clinical internships to take place in school settings that are structured and staffed to support teacher learning and student achievement. We also call on states and districts to require that candidates be supervised and mentored by effective practitioners, coaches, and clinical faculty. Clinical faculty drawn from higher education and the P-12 sector will have a say about whether teacher candidates are ready to enter the classroom on the basis of the candidate s performance and student outcomes. n Revamping Curricula, Incentives, and Staffing. It is time to fundamentally redesign preparation programs to support the close coupling of practice, content, theory, and pedagogy. Preparation faculty and mentor teachers should routinely be expected to model appropriate uses of assessment to enhance learning. We also call for significant changes in the reward structure in academe and the staffing models of P-12 schools to value clinical teaching and support effective mentoring and improvement in clinical preparation. Higher education must develop and implement alternative reward structures that enhance and legitimize the role of clinical faculty and create dual assignments for faculty with an ongoing role as teachers and mentors in schools. Similarly, school districts can work with preparation program partners to advance new staffing models patterned after teaching hospitals, which will enable clinical faculty, mentors, coaches, teacher interns and residents to work together to better educate students and prospective teachers as part of clinical practice teams. This report also urges the development of rigorous criteria for the preparation, selection, and certification of clinical faculty and mentors. n Supporting Partnerships. State policies should provide incentives for such partnership arrangements, and should remove any inhibiting legal or regulatory barriers. This will require iii TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

7 new financial incentives that would reward expansion of these partnerships. Incentives also should reward programs that produce graduates who do want to teach and are being prepared in fields where there is market demand. Universities should ensure that their teacher education programs are treated like other professional programs, and get their fair share of funding from the revenues they generate to support the development of clinically based programs. H n Expanding the Knowledge Base to Identify What Works and Support Continuous Improvement. Currently, there is not a large research base on what makes clinical preparation effective. We urge the federal and state government and philanthropy to invest in new research to support the development and continuous improvement of new models and to help determine which are the most effective. NCATE* should facilitate a national data network among interested collaborators states, institutions, school districts and others to help gather and disseminate what we learn from this research. Partnerships need this information on a continuing basis to trace the progress of their own programs and make day-to-day decisions. Sharing this information across the nation will help to shape future research as well as public policies on preparation. Hard Choices and Cost Implications Implementing this agenda is difficult but doable. It will require reallocation of resources and making hard choices about institutional priorities, changing selection criteria, and restructuring staffing patterns in P-12 schools. Clinically based programs may cost more per candidate than current programs but will be more cost-effective by yielding educators who enter the field ready to teach, which will increase productivity and reduce costs associated with staff development and turnover. We urge states, institutions, and school districts to explore alternative funding models, including those used in medicine to fuse funds for patient care and the training of residents in teaching hospitals. We also urge states and the federal government to provide incentives for programs that prepare teachers in high-need content and specialty areas and for teaching in schools with the most challenging populations. An Opportune Moment This is an opportune time to introduce these changes, in spite of the current economic climate. Federal, state, and district policy continue to focus on improving the quality of teaching and teachers as a cornerstone of school improvement. The development and acceptance of common core standards and InTASC core teaching standards for teachers are already helping to frame revisions of teacher education curricula. The expansion of state databases permits new kinds of accountability approaches, more useful feedback for schools, districts and preparation programs, and more easily accessible information. Efforts to invest in research on effective practice and the development of valid new tools to assess teacher performance and measure various domains of teaching that have been linked to student outcomes create an opportunity for the panel s recommendations to land on fertile ground. Although the totality of the changes recommended is sweeping, they can be scaffolded. We should take advantage of this moment by beginning to make some of them now and at little or no incremental expense. State policy makers can revamp teacher licensing requirements by raising expectations for graduates of teacher preparation programs. State program approval policies can be * NCATE convened and supported the work of the Panel. It has recently entered into partnership with the Teacher Accreditation Council (TEAC) to create the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) as the unified accreditor for the field. We expect this new partnership to provide accreditation with even greater leverage to implement the Panel s recommendations. iv

8 reformed to focus on clinical preparation, program outcomes, and partnerships with P-12 schools. School districts and preparation programs can begin to build powerful partnerships in collaboration with teachers associations. Higher education institutions can reallocate resources internally at the campus and school or department level to facilitate reform. NCATE can raise its accreditation standards. These are changes that can create momentum and lay the foundation for other reforms such as funding. Call To Action This report concludes with a Call to Action that urges teacher education programs to transform preparation of all teachers, regardless of where they teach, but also notes the urgent need to address the staffing and learning challenges facing high-need and low-performing schools. To support this implementation, we call on federal lawmakers and the U.S. Department of Education to invest Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds, funds available through School Improvement Grants for school turnaround efforts, and the continued funding of grants to school and university partnerships. Already, eight states California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee have signed letters of intent to implement the new agenda. As part of the NCATE Alliance for Clinical Teacher Preparation, these states will work with national experts, pilot diverse approaches to implementation, and bring new models of clinical preparation to scale in their states. Working with NCATE and other invested organizations including the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, the Association of Teacher Educators, the teacher unions, and their state and local affiliates, the Alliance also will reach out to and learn from other states working to transform teacher education. In addition to ensuring more rigorous monitoring and enforcement for program approval and accreditation, NCATE should pursue an agenda to promote the Panel recommendations. This will include raising the bar for accreditation; expanding membership and visiting teams to include a higher proportion of major research universities and selective colleges; standard setting to support transformation of preparation programs; capacity building that will involve both states and the profession; and promoting research, development and dissemination of prototypes and scaleup strategies. These activities are intended to inform and strengthen the role of accreditation in supporting the transformation of the education of teachers to a clinically based, partnership supported approach. We encourage all key stakeholders to join us in this effort, for much more is at stake than teacher education as an enterprise. Our economic future depends on our ability to ensure that all teachers have the skills and knowledge they will need to help their students overcome barriers to their success and complete school college- and career-ready. The next few years will help shape education policy and practice for many years to come. A comprehensive strategy to transform teacher education through clinical practice must be part of any significant national approach to school reform. We hope that this plan will serve as a road map for preparing the effective teachers and school leaders the nation will need in the future and provide the impetus for concerted action. v TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

9 H Transforming Teacher Education through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers Unprecedented Responsibilities, Unmet Challenges While family and poverty deeply affect student performance, research over the past decade indicates that no in-school intervention has a greater impact on student learning than an effective teacher. To prepare teachers for the unprecedented responsibilities they are required to take on, the United States must dramatically transform the teacher-preparation programs that educate the nation s four million teacher workforce. But to help the nation compete in the global economy, today s teachers will have to educate all students including those from increasingly diverse economic, racial, linguistic, and academic backgrounds to the same high learning outcomes. They must ensure that all children master rigorous course content, be able to apply what they learn to think critically and solve problems, and complete high school college-and workforce-ready. They must be able to balance a focus on academic learning with an ability to respond to each student s cognitive and social-emotional developmental needs. 1 These realities are having a profound impact on the classroom and demand programs that prepare teachers with the capacity to meet them. We need teachers who are well versed in their curricula, know their communities, apply their knowledge of child growth and development, use assessments to monitor student progress and effectively engage students in learning. Teachers need collaboration, communication, and problem-solving skills to keep pace with rapidly changing learning environments and new technologies. While teacher education has made improvements through innovation in institutions of higher education and alternative pathways, and while teaching has become more attractive to talented non- 1

10 traditional recruits, much more needs to be done, and more quickly. The public is demanding betterprepared teachers who will be effective, remain in teaching, and sustain school improvement. Many critics, policymakers, teachers, and school district leaders nationwide have raised concerns that today s teacher education programs are inadequately equipped to prepare educators for these new realities. How can we ensure that all new teachers will be better prepared to strengthen student learning? Improving the clinical practice of educators, experts say, holds great promise for sparking improvement in P-12 learning and achievement. The National Research Council (NRC) report, Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy, 2 identifies clinical preparation (or field experience ) as one of the three aspects of teacher preparation that are likely to have the highest potential for effects on outcomes for students, along with content knowledge and the quality of teacher candidates (p.180). Briefing papers prepared for the Panel 3 cite research suggesting that teachers benefit from preparation programs that provide well supervised field experiences (analogous to medical school internships) that are congruent with candidates eventual teaching, and that feature a capstone project often a portfolio that reflects the candidate s development of practice and evidence of student learning. 4 Research on professional development schools and urban teacher residencies indicates higher retention rates among new teachers 5 prepared in these intensive clinically based programs and greater teacher efficacy. Teacher effectiveness studies focused on the relationship of specific instructional practices and student achievement in core subject areas such as mathematics and reading are providing critical input for strengthening clinical preparation. 6 Turning the Education of Teachers Upside-Down The needs of public education are greater than they have ever been before. In light of this, we need a dramatic overhaul of how teachers are prepared. This will require two major shifts. First, the very focus of teacher education programs needs to be redesigned from beginning to end. Teacher education has too often been segmented with subject-matter preparation, theory, and pedagogy taught in isolated intervals and too far removed from clinical practice. But teaching, like medicine, is a profession of practice, and prospective teachers must be prepared to become expert practitioners who know how to use the knowledge of their profession to advance student learning and how to build their professional knowledge The National Research Council recently identified clinical preparation as one of the three aspects of teacher preparation that are likely to have the highest potential for effects on outcomes for students, along with content knowledge and quality of candidate teachers. through practice. In order to achieve this we must place practice at the center of teaching preparation. In this, educators can take guidance from Sir William Osler, one of the key figures in professionalizing medical education, who noted: He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all. Expert practitioners need to study content and pedagogy, concepts of learning and child development to know the waters they will 2 TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

11 We must place practice at the center of teaching preparation. navigate, but they also must be able to demonstrate that they can use what they know in ways that help real students learn. This means putting emphasis on giving teacher candidates opportunities to get their sea legs by helping them develop and study their practice and the practice of their mentors and more experienced colleagues, use what they know, and improve their performance in schools and classrooms under the tutelage of expert clinical educators. H Second, this transformation cannot be accomplished by teacher preparation programs working alone. Preparation programs, school districts, teachers and their representatives and state and federal policymakers need to accept that their common goal of preparing effective teachers for improved student achievement cannot be achieved without each other s full participation. They must form new strategic partnerships to share in the responsibility of preparing teachers in radically different ways. All teacher preparation programs and districts have to start thinking about teacher preparation as a responsibility they share, working together. Only when preparation programs become deeply engaged with schools will their clinical preparation become truly robust and will they be able to support the development of candidates urgently needed skills and learn what schools really need. Conversely, only through much closer cooperation with preparation programs will districts be able to hire new teachers who are better prepared to be effective in their schools. Through partnerships, preparation programs will be able to integrate course work, theory and pedagogy with practitioner knowledge. 7 As indicated in the chart below, the planning, funding and operations will become integrated into the daily functions of the partner groups, reflect what is known about best practices, and be made sustainable over time. A Continuum of Partnership Development for Clinically Based Teacher Preparation* Goal Partnerships that support: n Development of clinical practice knowledge, skills, and dispositions n Student Achievement n Inquiry for continuous improvement Beginning Beliefs, verbal commitments, plans, organization, and initial work are consistent with the goals of the partnership Developing Partners pursue the goals with partial institutional support Integrated The goals of the partnership are integrated into the partnering institutions. Partnership work is expected and supported, and reflects what is known about best practice. Sustaining and Generative Systemic changes take place in policy and practice in partnering institutions. Policy at the district, state, and national level supports partnerships for clinically based teacher preparation and improved student learning. *Source: NCATE (2001). Standards for Professional Development Schools. 3

12 All teacher preparation programs and districts have to start thinking about teacher preparation as a responsibility they share, working together. As the vast majority of teachers are, and will likely continue to be, prepared in institutions of higher education these changes have significant implications for academe. These arrangements will require reallocation of resources, new staffing models for schools and reward structures for faculty, and a shift in the emphasis of teacher education programs from an emphasis on course work to using evidence-based knowledge to inform practice so it effectively addresses students needs. Here again, medical education, incorporating research and clinical faculty, provides an established model from which we can learn. Status of the Field The Blue Ribbon Panel examined the status of the field and found that clinical preparation is poorly defined and inadequately supported. While new and experienced teachers repeatedly cite classroombased experiences and student teaching as the most highly valued elements of their preparation, clinical practice remains the most ad hoc part of teacher education in many programs. Most states require student teaching, the majority requiring somewhere between 10 and 14 weeks, but with few exceptions, such as Maryland and the state of Washington, they are silent on what this crucially important experience should look like, and how programs should be held accountable. Although roughly half of the states require training of mentors, they do not specify what the roles and requirements of mentors should be. 8 This has caused great variation in how and where clinical training is delivered and an endemic unevenness in quality. A teacher candidate may spend a full year in a professional development school teaching every day with an expert mentor, having had several practicum experiences prior to that year. Another candidate may have the eight weeks of required student teaching experience with an inexperienced mentor at the conclusion of the preparation program. Still others begin serving as teachers of record with little or no prior clinical practice. The Panel identified 10 key principles that should be followed in designing more effective clinically based preparation programs. Most states require student teaching, the majority requiring somewhere between 10 and 14 weeks. With few exceptions, they are silent on what this crucially important experience should look like, and how programs should be held accountable. 4 TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

13 10 DESIGN PRINCIPLES 10 Design Principles for Clinically Based Preparation H 1. Student learning is the focus: P-12 student learning must serve as the focal point for the design and implementation of clinically based teacher preparation, and for the assessment of newly minted teachers and the programs that have prepared them. Candidates need to develop practice that advances student knowledge as defined by, for example, the Common Core State Standards, for those subjects for which they have been developed. 2. Clinical preparation is integrated throughout every facet of teacher education in a dynamic way: The core experience in teacher preparation is clinical practice. Content and pedagogy are woven around clinical experiences throughout preparation, in course work, in laboratory-based experiences, and in school-embedded practice. 3. A candidate s progress and the elements of a preparation program are continuously judged on the basis of data: Candidates practice must be directly linked to the InTASC core teaching standards for teachers and Common Core Standards, and evaluation of candidates must be based on students outcome data, including student artifacts, summative and formative assessments; data from structured observations of candidates classroom skills by supervising teachers and faculty; and data about the preparation program and consequences of revising it. 4. Programs prepare teachers who are expert in content and how to teach it and are also innovators, collaborators and problem solvers: Candidates must develop a base of knowledge, a broad range of effective teaching practices, and the ability to integrate the two to support professional decision-making. To be successful teachers in challenging and changing environments, candidates must learn to use multiple assessment processes to advance learning and inform their practice with data to differentiate their teaching to match their students progress. Further, effective teachers are innovators and problem solvers, working with colleagues constantly seeking new and different ways of teaching students who are struggling. 5. Candidates learn in an interactive professional community: Candidates need lots of opportunities for feedback. They must practice in a collaborative culture, expecting rigorous peer review of their practice and their impact on student learning. 5

14 6. Clinical educators and coaches are rigorously selected and prepared and drawn from both higher education and the P-12 sector: Those who lead the next generation of teachers throughout their preparation and induction must themselves be effective practitioners, skilled in differentiating instruction, proficient in using assessment to monitor learning and provide feedback, persistent searchers for data to guide and adjust practice, and exhibitors of the skills of clinical educators. They should be specially certified, accountable for their candidates performance and student outcomes, and commensurately rewarded to serve in this crucial role. 7. Specific sites are designated and funded to support embedded clinical preparation: All candidates should have intensive embedded clinical school experiences that are structured, staffed, and financed to support candidate learning and student achievement. 8. Technology applications foster high-impact preparation: State-of-the-art technologies should be employed by preparation programs to promote enhanced productivity, greater efficiencies, and collaboration through learning communities. Technology should also be an important tool to share best practices across partnerships, and to facilitate on-going professional learning. 9. A powerful R&D agenda and systematic gathering and use of data supports continuous improvement in teacher preparation: Effective teacher education requires more robust evidence on teaching effectiveness, best practices, and preparation program performance. A powerful research and development infrastructure jointly defined by preparation programs, school districts, and practitioners supports knowledge development, innovation, and continuous improvement. While not every clinically based preparation program will contribute new research knowledge or expand development, each must systematically gather and use data, and become part of a national data network on teacher preparation that can increase understanding of what is occurring and evidence of progress in the field. 10. Strategic partnerships are imperative for powerful clinical preparation: School districts, preparation programs, teacher unions, and state policymakers must form strategic partnerships based on the recognition that none can fully do the job alone. Each partner s needs can be met better by defining clinically based teacher preparation as common work for which they share responsibility, authority, and accountability covering all aspects of program development and implementation. 6 TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

15 H What Teachers Say about Clinical Preparation The Panel s work was informed by practitioners in the Teacher Leaders Network, a virtual community populated by highly accomplished teacher leaders from across the nation. TLN is a national initiative of the Center for Teaching Quality. These teachers web-based conversation over four days brought many teachers voices into the deliberations of the Panel.* I think we need to teach [candidates] to mine carefully, to dig deeper than the raw scores, looking at the individual students, their scores, and trends in the data, [doing] all of this with an eye for discrepancies and explanations. - Cossondra George is a middle and high school special education teacher in northern Michigan. Teacher educators must understand the impact that rapid change will have on curriculum design, assessments, pedagogy, and learning management (no longer only classroom management). And they cannot understand the implications if they do not participate. - Emily Vickery is the 21st century learning specialist at a parochial school in Florida. I think many good teachers start off student teaching with shortcomings, but it s the failure to make changes for the next time which creates the problem. Coming up with an evaluation system that watches for failure to grow or reflect on teaching would be ideal. Stephanie Basile is a fifth grade teacher at an elementary school near Denver, Colorado. I have developed my expertise through mentorships and collaborative partnerships, inquiry and reflection, and purposeful study and professional development. Sherry Dismuke is a first grade teacher in the Boise School District in Oregon. Something I look for as I work with student teachers is their ability to analyze the teaching of others AND their own teaching. It s hard to imagine teachers becoming effective over time without being able to analyze teaching, in meaningful ways, in relation to the effects [on] student learning. - Elizabeth Stein is a special education teacher in Smithtown, Long Island in New York. * For a summary of the conversation see briefing paper prepared by Renee Moore, Teacher Leaders Advise on Clinical Preparation, available at 7

16 A New, Clinically Based Model for Teacher Preparation The Panel calls for clinically based preparation, which fully integrates content, pedagogy, and professional coursework around a core of clinical experiences. 9 Ensuring that all teacher preparation programs follow these principles will require far more than tinkering with current models to increase opportunities for clinical practice or longer internships. However, significant innovations over the last two decades are helping point the way forward. Major efforts led by reform-minded groups of education deans, institutions of higher education and teachers unions have supported the creation of partnerships focused on building strong connections between the preparation of teachers and schools. 10 They have created hybrid institutions called professional development and professional practice schools staffed and structured to simultaneously support student achievement and clinical preparation and, sometimes, the full continuum of teacher learning. They are intended to play a similar role to teaching hospitals in medical education. Many preparation programs have moved in this direction, guided, for example, by the principles of the Holmes Group and the Standards for Professional Development Schools created by NCATE with the field. Other innovative programs have been initiated by districts, foundations, and community organizations in partnership with universities that have developed similar clinically based preparation models. Many of these programs, including urban teacher residencies, have been successful in terms of preparing more effective teachers, reducing teacher turnover, and improving student outcomes in the process. 11 The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) recently profiled extensive clinical work underway in 67 colleges of education. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has developed a state-wide model that has leveraged state and philanthropic support to bolster clinical preparation in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and a growing number of states. The Foundation provides $30,000/year stipends to prospective math and science teachers who agree to spend a year in clinically robust Master s degree programs and teach for three years in low-income rural and urban secondary schools. Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows are placed in cohorts in wellrun, high-needs schools where they are mentored by clinical faculty and expert teachers. But these programs are not the norm, and few have fully integrated clinical preparation throughout the process of teacher education. They are often handicapped in their efforts by the lack of commitment among all partners to taking on new roles and responsibilities and by the lack of a supportive infrastructure, including institutional, district, and state policy and funding strategies. Clinically based approaches must have the commitment and support of the full complement of stakeholders who need to be involved. Clinically based approaches, the Panel believes, have numerous advantages over traditional practica and student teaching arrangements, and partnerships that exist in name only, in no small part because they address the context for teacher education preparation programs and require school districts to take on shared responsibility for teacher education. In clinically based programs, preparation programs learn more directly what they need to know about what schools really need and they enable districts to hire new teachers who are prepared to be effective in their schools. In these programs, teacher 8 TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

17 preparation can more fully incorporate practitioner knowledge through the development of clinical faculty. 12 Candidates can achieve the full value of embedded clinical experience because school districts will have committed to reallocating, restructuring and restaffing schools for clinical preparation. Students, the primary focus, can then benefit from functioning learning communities formed to support teacher learning and from the additional human resources that can be focused on their needs. Together, these partners can shift a program s emphasis from learning about teaching to using knowledge to develop practice that effectively addresses students needs. It also calls for stringent new accountability mechanisms and the creation of reward structures that ensure that this takes place. This shift, the panel says, also better reflects the complex nature of professional practice. New teachers need more than technical skills; they need a repertoire of general and subject-specific practices and the understandings and judgment to engage all students in worthwhile learning. They need to have opportunities to reflect upon and think about what they do, how they make decisions, how they theorize their work, and how they integrate their content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge into what they do. This can be accomplished through a combination of both school embedded practice and laboratory-type experiences. In a clinically based preparation program, laboratory experiences, school embedded learning and course work are integrated through a structure designed to help the candidate develop both the knowledge base and skills of professional practice. The lab experiences, experts say, are designed to support the investigation of practice, and embedded school experiences offer guided practice in real-life situations. 14 Engaging Academic Faculty in Clinical Preparation Teacher education programs have developed strategies to help better acculturate college faculty to the needs of schools. For example, at National Louis University (NLU), faculty from arts and sciences and from education interested in working with the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) Urban Teacher Residency sign up for Boot Camp. This commits them to make four intensive visits to schools involved in the program. They must get to know the students, the communities, the district, and the challenges their students will encounter. This is required before they are accepted as faculty in the urban teacher residency program. NLU faculty must address how their teaching of candidates relates to addressing the needs of the students their candidates will teach. 13 Another approach to engaging academic faculty in clinical preparation are the PedLabs at Boston College. Similar to a lab component of an undergraduate-level science course, a pedagogical lab is a one-credit add-on to a traditional three-credit arts and sciences course. Prospective teachers can elect to take that additional course. Each content area has a committee that includes education faculty; they design a course that focuses on ways to teach the content in a school setting. The arts and sciences faculty can observe their students teaching the content in their clinical experience and then provide feedback on their instructional strategies and on the representation of the content. At Montclair State University, arts and sciences faculty co-teach content methods courses and advise pre-service teachers. Montclair is one of the more than 25 partnerships that are members of the National Network for Educational Renewal that are working to revamp teacher preparation and P-12 schools through a collaboration of school and higher education institutions, including colleges of education and arts and sciences departments within the academy. H 9

18 School embedded practice focuses on developing complex analytic and practical skills. It provides realworld context for developing a whole constellation of complex skills that are orchestrated differently in different contexts, including the full range of students cognitive and social-emotional developmental needs and what the circumstances are in the classroom at the time. School-embedded experiences help teachers develop content-specific and general teaching skills and provide opportunities for candidates to become active members of learning communities, develop skills and dispositions associated with teaming, and work with parents within the community. A defined clinical curriculum will provide the prospective teacher with real responsibilities, the opportunity to make decisions and to develop skills to analyze student needs and adjust practices using student performance data while receiving continuous monitoring and feedback from mentors. Equally important are much needed laboratory experiences embedded throughout the preparation program. Laboratory experiences provide prospective teachers opportunities to learn through on-line and video demonstrations, analyzing case studies representing both exemplary practice and common dilemmas, and participating in peer and micro-teaching. Such experiences offer the opportunity to analyze a virtual student s pattern of behavior, or engage candidates in the life of a virtual school, calling upon the candidates to investigate and make decisions, and to see the consequences of those decisions. Clinically based education programs can take some lessons in integrating laboratory experiences, embedded clinical learning and course work from medical preparation. In some programs, medical students follow a cohort of patients from the day they enter medical education to the day they complete their training, even as they take coursework and work with simulated patients in the course of their preparation. In the problem-based method developed at Harvard Medical School, for example, case studies and simulations of problems in diagnosing patient conditions, or working with families are used to construct an integrated spiral curriculum. These same cases are revisited several times during a semester. This allows medical students, working in small groups guided by clinical and academic faculty, to approach real life issues of individual patients, in increasingly more knowledgeable and sophisticated ways as their course work adds to their knowledge base. A similar approach can be used for teacher candidates, addressing the learning needs of individual students, classes, and whole school issues. 10 TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CLINICAL PRACTICE: A NATIONAL STRATEGY TO PREPARE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

19 H Strategies to Prepare Candidates to Address Student Needs Through the years, preparation programs have developed unique approaches to help candidates focus their work on identifying and meeting the needs of students. These include: n Initial community mapping exercises used at the University of Washington help put the focus on students from the very beginning, and are designed to make candidates aware of who their students are, where they come from, and the full range of needs they may have. n Case conferencing, developed at the UCLA lab school in the 1960 s, which help candidates, working with experienced faculty, learn to diagnose and work with individual children who pose difficult problems. n Specific protocols, developed by MacDonald and Allen for the National School Reform Faculty enable candidates to analyze student work and to refine their assessment systems. n Action research focuses candidates and their mentors on efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning in their classrooms and schools. n Using an inquiry stance on teaching to develop in candidates the disposition and skills for working with experienced teachers in inquiry learning communities where everybody is a learner and a researcher, and practice is the site for ongoing inquiry. 15 n Instructional rounds, adapted from medical education, enable candidates to take turns engaging school and university faculty and candidates in reflecting on learning and teaching in particular groups at a particular point in time. At Clark University and other programs, rounds are integrated throughout the preparation program to build candidates skills in environments where collaboration and continuous feedback are routine. 16 n The Defense of Learning approach helps focus candidates on their responsibility for student learning. For example, all teacher candidates in the New Visions for Public Schools Hunter College Urban Teacher Residency in New York City must use the inquiry cycle to inform their instruction throughout the semester, and then prepare and defend a presentation at the end of each semester illustrating their impact on student achievement. The presentation includes different forms of data, including samples of student work, videos, and results of various assessments. The presentations provide an opportunity to assess residents impact on student learning and ensure that residents professional development goals are focused around the needs of their students. Unsuccessful defenses provide an opportunity for teacher educators to identify specific needs for residents to improve or in some cases, an opportunity to counsel residents to leave the teacher preparation program. Both presentations are given in front of a panel that includes the candidate s mentor, other residents, non-resident teachers, school administrators, and Hunter College faculty. 11